A letter of gratitude as we near Voice closure
Dear grantee partners,
As we are rounding out the year 2023, we are writing this message to share an important update with you regarding the future of Voice. On 31 December 2024, the Voice programme initiated by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs (the Ministry) and implemented by Oxfam and Hivos will come to a close. This follows from the competitive legal tender with a set time frame adopted by the Ministry in 2016 to establish Voice. This provided December 2024 as the end date of the programme. While the closure of Voice is a legal inevitability, as the Voice teams we are committed to making the final year of our partnership with all of you really count!
To start with, here is a brief snapshot of our final annual plan:
- First and foremost, we are committed to ensuring the smooth closure of your Voice-funded project. This means we will continue to stay in communication with you to learn about any challenges you are undergoing or anticipating in terms of program implementation. If you don’t hear from your Voice contact person, please reach out so we can jointly find solutions to keep project implementation on track. This is really important as all Voice grant contracts come to a hard close on 30 June 2024. Therefore, there is no possibility of extending the implementation period beyond this date. There will also be no new calls for proposals or grant contracts as the budget of Voice is now fully allocated.
- Second, we will continue emphasising linking and learning as the means to fostering deeper connections, collaborations, and community among all grantee partners. We are planning to organise a series of close-out events at the national, cross-regional and global levels between February and June 2024. Please treat this as an advance save-the-date and look out for the events calendar on our website in January 2024!
- Finally, living up to our value to be a learning program, we will support you in reflecting on and documenting your project journey through integrating a storytelling approach into monitoring and evaluation. We will complement this with documentation of Voice’s own learning about grant making and linking and learning at the end of 8-years, an addendum to the Voice@5 Learning Document and Voice Final Evaluation Report.
We are very cognizant that while this may be the end of the road for Voice in its current iteration, your crucial work to build just and inclusive societies is far from done. We are keen to work together and explore how we can contribute to enhance the sustainability of your projects and organisations. Please look out for the annual grantee partner feedback survey that will seek to gather your input and advice on what resources and platforms Voice can support in creating or providing that are most useful in terms of sustaining the impact of your work.
From 2016 to 2023, the circle of Voice grantee partners has continued growing wider, to the extent that we have surpassed our original plan of awarding 631 total grants by over a 100. We gave out our 750th grant earlier this year! At the same time, the connections, peer-learning, and solidarities among grantee partners have deepened through linking and learning, such that we have no doubt that these communities will sustain in small and big ways, with or without Voice… To read these as accomplishments of Voice will be wholly inaccurate. Instead, these are a testament to YOUR power and YOUR will as rightsholders to create responsive and inclusive societies, for yourself and for the generations to come. We are continuing to root for you to succeed, and we hope you will continue to accompany Voice on this last lap!
P.S., we know you still may have questions about the closing of Voice. Please reach out to Ishita at ishita.dutta@voice.global in case you need more information.
